Foursquare V1 Gets an Expiration Date

It's been over three months since Foursquare announced V2 of its Foursquare API. At the time the company announced that its original API would no longer exist sometime this year. With an announcement to its developer list, Foursquare has now made the exact date known: August 1, V1 will be no more.

back in december last year, we introduced api v2. it was an improvement in almost every way from v1 of our api, which had been active since early 2009. we took everything we'd learned since the start of foursquare and with
our use of v1 and put all that thinking into the new version.

when we announced v2, we didn't specify exactly when we'd turn off v1. we wanted to make sure we gave you enough time as well as wait for our own apps to go live on v2 (all our official apps run on v2 now).

Despite being written all in lowercase, developers still using V1 should read the post as if it were in all caps. There's now a countdown to move to the far superior V2, which includes OAuth authentication and JSON responses. A number of new features were also added with V2, including photos and comments.

This announcement follows last month's Foursquare hackathon, which the company saw as a way to encourage adoption of V2.

Transitioning away from V1 may prove difficult, as Twitter discovered when it shut off basic authentication last August. While Foursquare's developer community it not as mature or big as Twitter's, there are still plenty of applications based on V1 and it's hard to say how many users rely upon it. Foursquare's move, in contrast to Twitter's, is about more than infrastructure and security, so it is an easier sell to developers.

About the author:Adam DuVander
-- Adam heads developer relations at Orchestrate, a database-as-a-service company. He's spent many years analyzing APIs and developer tools. Previously he worked at SendGrid, edited ProgrammableWeb and wrote for Wired and Webmonkey. Adam is also the author of mapping API cookbook Map Scripting 101.

Comments(1)

[...] through some changes, and the most important of those is that the old v1 API is going dead, as we&#8217;ve known since March. Older apps, especially abandoned ones, will stop working then, as will any newer app that [...]

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